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Advent of Code 2024

adventofcode.com

111–120 of 580 posts

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#111

Last year I got stuck on Day 12 for a full week, and thinking about how to solve it consumed my every waking moment. I think this year, I'm going to be kind to myself and not participate so I can really enjoy the winter break from work.

A friend recently shared this with me. I think you'll like it.

https://eli.li/december-adventure

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#112
Going to use it to learn a bit of Ada. I've always been curious about it. It's not a popular language, and it has some serious documentation problems. Sure, there are guides for "hello, world" and other basics, but how to use a generic integer vector or even how to read lines with two numbers from stdin or a file? That was a bit of a puzzle. I saw a solution that allocates an array of 99999 elements, just to track the number of occurrences of each number in the input.

Ada took me somewhere between 90-120 minutes, whereas I had the first problem done in JavaScript in about 30s-60s, just for verification.

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the people I know already participate on private boards. AI enshitification will only speed up the process of moving there.

Are we using enshittification for everything we don't like these days? We invented calculators, those really enshittified manual arithmetic puzzles. Private boards for this stuff makes sense anyway, it's the Internet afterall.

Using LLM for this kind of thing is like using cheats or aim assist for online games. So yes, this is prime example of enshifittication.

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#114

Last year I got stuck on Day 12 for a full week, and thinking about how to solve it consumed my every waking moment. I think this year, I'm going to be kind to myself and not participate so I can really enjoy the winter break from work.

I will probably solve the first 7 puzzles like every year and then just stop.

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#115

I will try to do it with F# and Gleam this year, but like every year I won’t have time (and brain) to do more than 10/12 days ^^ For the pythonists around here, give F# a try: it can feels very close to scripting and it has a wonderful REPL too :)

I'm continuing my tradition of doing AoC in Whitespace[0]. The first year I did it, it was motivation to build out a standard library so things wouldn't be so tedious. Now, I find myself wishing I had finished better tooling. I debug with wsjq[1], a CLI debugger like gdb written in jq, but it's slow.

[0]: https://github.com/thaliaarchi/ws-challenges

[1]: https://github.com/thaliaarchi/wsjq

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#116

Am I alone in thinking that measuring time to get answer is the worst possible metric? I have not participated because of that (yet). If there is a community for those who use other rules to compare actual solutions instead of answers I would be interested to hear about it. I am coming from low level C++ gamedev side so I understand that most people here use different tools to solve different problems.

Can you propose other metrics that don't involve executing stuff in a whole lot of languages? The point is to let people work in whatever they want, as only the solution matters. If only the solution matters I don't really see other options beyond time.

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's linux support? :)

If almost 9 years were not enough to make this question seem silly, perhaps DuckDuckGo/Kagi/Perplexity could answer this?

Sure those can answer it. That person is perhaps trying to be social on a social network by inviting comments instead?

Re: Advent of Code 2024

#120

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. The use of “pretty far” gives them a bit of an out, but I think this statement is a little disingenuous. Last year, at least, a bunch of the problems needed fairly sophisticated algorithms to find the solution in a reasonable amount of time. To me, a little progr…

Anecdote to support your comment: The Chinese Remainder Theorem has featured in Advent of Code at least twice IIRC. Not an algorithm the average programmer (average is a very fuzzy term, yeah) would know.
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